An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Friday, April 1, 2016

Kicking off National Poetry Month 2016 With Everett Hoagland

It’s
National Poetry Month Again!If you have been visiting here for a while, you know what that means—it’s our sixth annual round up of daily doses of verse!If you are new, here’s the scoop.Every day all month I will
feature poets and their poems.I aim to be as broad and inclusive as possible to style, subject, period, gender, race, and neglected voices.I don’t
want just a parade of the usual
dead white men, but a lot of them did write
some damn fine poetry, so they have
their place here to.As always, selections follow my own tastes and whims.Yours may be different.But I am open
to—eager for—suggestions, especially for
contemporary writers.I do not subscribe to dozens of little magazines or prowl the internet for poetry posts.I often only stumble on new and unknown poets and I am sure I miss some great stuff.Please feel free to turn me on to some—or be
bold and submit your own.I don’t
and can’t promise to use everything.

Everett Hoagland.

A
great place to start is with one of my favorite
working poets, Everett Hoagland.I
first encountered Hoagland in the pages of UUWorld magazine back in 2011 when
he knocked my socks off with a
series of poems dealing with returning
to his African roots including the horrors of the slave trade,Middle Passage and
the ambiguity and paradox of being African and American
at the same time.I was so impressed with his long form
poetry that I wrote a laudatory
letter to the editor about it. Hoagland responded
warmly and personally and we have
remained in contact.Last May, just after the conclusion of
the Poetry Month series on the blog he was kind enough to send me an autographed copy of his brand new collection, The
Music and Other Selected Poems.I
was pleased to see that he excerpted my letter for a back cover blurb:

Everett Hoagland’s…is...substantial
poetry…I
commend the essential bravery of Hoagland’s work, which connects the intimate
and personal now to the vastness of a historic and global outrage…This is
self-knowledge on an epic scale. All of us, regardless of our origins would do
well to come to such grips with the long shadows of our own histories.

I
was even happier to find the poems I
had admired included in the new volume—poems that I shared in a Poetry
Month posting back in 2012.

Hoagland
was coming off of a very good stretch after
retiring as a professor of English at the University
of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and finishing his tenure as the poet laureate
of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the
historic whaling and fishing port which has been his long-time home.In 2012 he published his wonderful book Ocean Voices: An Anthology of Ocean Poems which included some
of his gems.He had just been awarded the 2015 Langston HughesAwardjoining the ranks
of eminent black poets including Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Gwendolyn
Brooks.

The
award was especially meaningful to
him in light of special connection to
Hughes, the Godfather of African-American verse.Hoagland was a seniorat Hughes’s alma mater Lincoln University in Pennsylvania when the great man visited the school in 1964 and met with selected students.Hoagland showed up with two poems in hand.In an interview given to Lauren Daley inSouth Coast Today,
Hoagland recalled:

He was nice
enough not to say anything about the cornier of the two, and made concrete
suggestions on the other, and that one went on to win the creative writing
award at the University. So this whole experience has come full circle.Hughes helped me win that award, and now I’ve
gotten an award for my life’s work in his name.

Hoagland
was deeply influenced by Hughes, but also by other Black poets, especially his personal friend Amiri Baraka.He explores their voices and influences in The Music which contains work spanning the 1960’s to today.He also considers
music, especially jazz and blues but all forms of expression of
the African-American experience including rap.He touches on historic context not only including slavery and its aftermath, but the labor and civil rights
movements and currents of Black Nationalism from Marcus Garvey on.He weavesall of it together in thecollection reflecting a deep and mature understanding of what it means to be Black and American.

Hoagland
was born on December 18, 1942 in Philadelphia.He graduated from Lincoln University, perhaps. He came of age in the Civil
Rights era and matured into a
community coming to grips with its identitymanifesting itself in the Black
Power movement.

He
went to work as a teacher in the Philadelphia public school system before returning to academia to get his master’s degree at Brown University and to become a professor of English at the
University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.He settled with his wife and children in New Bedford.

He
has been a prolific poet and writer, highly regarded as a leading
voice of new Black literature
while, perhaps unsurprisingly, escaping much acclaim among the Whitepoetry establishment.Among
his books are, Ten Poems: A Collection, 1968; Black Velvet, 1970; Scrimshaw,
1976; This City and Other Poems, 1997; and Here: New and Selected Poems,
2002.He has also been widely
anthologized and along the way also picked up the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction in 1974 and a National Endowment for the Humanities
Fellowship in 1984.

The cover of Hoagland's most recent book features a photo of his great grandfather musician Benjamin William Hoagland showing cultural roots that run deep.

The Music

After reading All
God’s Dangers:The Life of Nate Shaw

Your archival
voice,

our long blues
song,

life’s story

coughed up

the blood-soaked
cotton

gag.Blue blood,

book-long,

blue steel
guitar blues,

Your Smith and
Wesson

.32 gun metal
voice.

What did they
call you

when you
resisted?

“If you were

a white man: principled,

mule: stuborn,

nigger: crazy.”

You were a blue
steel guitar.

and your wife
was

a fiddle and a
tambourine,

Hannah.Soft as cotton

and as strong.

And your wife
was

a fiddle and a
tambourine

and your sons
are

canefifes,

we your
daughters

banjoes,

playing your gun
metal voice,

playing your
blue steel

guitar book-long
song

CRAZY!

Note:Shaw was a heroic sharecropper organizer in
early 20th Century Alabama.All
God’s Dangers, his transcribed oral autobiography, won the National
Book Award for its editor/transcriber, Theodore Rosengarten.

—Everett Hoagland1974

From The
Music and Other Selected Poems by Everett Hoagland, North Star Nova
Press.Copyright Everett Hoagland, 2015.